The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 7: 1961-1970

1963: The Kennedy Assassination (Security)

The Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President Robert F. Kennedy sparked conspiracy theories that last to this day.

Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone? In 1964, a third of Americans rejected the Warren Report's conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Local Dallas businessman Clay Shaw was tried for the murder but was acquitted in March 1969.

And what about the murder of Oswald, who was killed in police custody two days later by Jack Ruby before Oswald could go to trial?

Let's not forget about the "magic bullet theory," either. Was more than one bullet used to kill the president? The FBI at first said yes, then no — paving the way for theories that Oswald did not act alone.

1969: The Concorde (Vehicles)

People don’t fly on airplanes to travel slowly. And once supersonic flight became a reality in the late 1940s, the aerospace industry and the flying public dreamed of a supersonic transport that would give airlines the ability to fly passengers faster than ever. As engineers refined supersonic designs, developing an airplane to carry passengers faster than the speed of sound was no longer a problem. Designing one that could be operated for a profit still stumps the industry today.

By the late 1950s, several SST designs were on the drawing boards in the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. But only a partnership between the British and French would produce the Concorde. And after the first flight in 1969, it would go on to be the only supersonic airliner to be put into regular service. Passengers paid many, many times the going transatlantic rate to make the trip between Europe and North America in around 3 hours, 30 minutes. The airplane would stretch 6 to 10 inches during cruise, and though it was fast, passengers were packed into the sleek fuselage like sardines. But the small cabin and high price was no problem for those who enjoyed cruising at twice the speed of sound.

This is a Jan. 21, 1976 photo of a British Airways Concorde as it makes its inaugural flight from Heathrow Airport in London. British Airways suspended Concorde operations Tuesday after being told that British and French officials intended to revoke the supersonic plane's airworthiness certification, the airline said.

Photo: Dave Caulkin/AP

1962: MIT Students Blast Videogames Into Hyperspace (Games)

MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club was the birthplace of hacker culture in the early '60s, and one of its members' passions was the PDP-1 computer that had recently been installed at the school. The PDP-1 was about the size of three refrigerators and cost, in 2012 money, about $1 million. In other words, it was very small and ridiculously cheap. Programmer Steve Russell and his fellow proto-nerds took inspiration from the sci-fi novels they loved and came up with Spacewar!, a game about an interstellar dogfight. Two players took control of spaceships that were being pulled into the gravity field of a sun at the center of the screen. First one to shoot the other wins. In a pinch, they could flip the "hyperspace" switch and teleport to a random, possibly even more dangerous location. Distributed on rolls of punched paper tape, Spacewar! became an incredibly popular game among students at universities with access to a PDP-1. One of them was Nolan Bushnell, who would go on to found Atari – its first arcade game, Computer Space, was a Spacewar! clone.

1960s: Psychedelic Research (Science)

No area of science more completely embodied the 1960s' kaleidoscopic cultural turbulence than research on psychedelic drugs. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, which came to academic attention in the previous decade, was studied in labs across the land, as was psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. They were hailed as psychotherapeutic aids and tools for investigating consciousness; the research was officially sanctioned, and some studies, such as Project MKUltra, in which eventual Merry Prankster and hippie icon Ken Kesey participated, were even government-sponsored.

Image: Cover of "The Psychedelic Experience," narrated by Timothy Leary and released in 1966. Credit: Smithsonian Institution

1960: The Nuclear Powered Carrier (War)

The Royal Navy first came up with the idea of launching aircraft from a makeshift runway on HMS Argus in 1918. Aircraft carrier engineers have since been plagued with a question; how do you pack as many jets onboard as possible while making sure the size of the ship doesn’t limit its speed?

In 1960 a team of 915 U.S. Navy designers answered that question with the USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The eight on-ship nuclear reactors afford two key advantages. Firstly, some much-needed space is freed up by not carrying liquid fuel for the ship’s engines. Secondly, the vessel is given a kick of more than 200,000 horsepower.

That extra speed allows a much bigger ship to be built. No longer did aircraft carrier builders have to focus on keeping designs as slim and petite as possible. Enterprise proved that if there’s a sizable brute force behind an object, then it’ll move fast enough – no matter the size. The ship is longer than the Chrysler building is high and boasts a flight deck of 4.5 acres. This has allowed the Enterprise to host as many as 100 aircraft at once. The nuclear reactors have a lifetime of around 20 years, so barring the need for aircraft fuel, the ship has an almost unlimited operational range.

When the USSR sent a giant flotilla toward Cuba with the intent of supplying the communist island with nuclear missiles in 1962, the U.S. responded by ordering the Navy to form a blockade. Admiral Anderson, the chief of naval operations, knew that success hinged on ensuring an enormous U.S. Navy presence in the Caribbean so he turned to Enterprise.

Enterprise underwent an inactivation service on December 1, 2012 but the 2,400 miles of blueprints made during the design stages have an even longer lasting legacy. The Navy is already constructing a new carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy. The new carrier will build on the innovations made by Enterprise with electromagnetic aircraft launching systems, advanced arresting gear, and a dual-band radar.

Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.

Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.

This week's installment takes us back to 1961-1970, when the seeds for the compact disc were planted, the world met the computer mouse for the first time and a beloved U.S. president was assassinated.

We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.

1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Entertainment)

While the '60s were known for the rise of psychedelics, no drugs were needed for moviegoers to get their minds fully blown by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick's epic film, co-written by the director and science-fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke, seamlessly transported viewers from "The Dawn of Man" to humanity's spacefaring future, with a malevolent computer and an embryonic Star-Child to keep things totally spellbinding.

While 2001 set the bar high for cerebral sci-fi films in 1968, a television series that would fuel a fan empire premiered two years earlier: Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek showed just how compelling big ideas could be on the small screen (cheesy monsters not withstanding).

1961: Rock and Davis (Business)

You can argue that venture-capital-like deals were already happening before Arthur Rock and Tommy Davis set up shop in San Francisco with $5 million to invest in 1961, but none were as successful. A massive win for Rock and Davis was early computer company Scientific Data Systems, which was founded in 1962 with $280,000 and sold to Xerox in 1968 for $990 million. Rock backed Intel in 1968, and would go on to pick winners like Teledyne, Apple and others while running his own venture capital firm.

It was the huge returns that Rock and Davis (and other early West Coast VC firms) were experiencing that legitimized the asset class (Rock is often credited with coming up with the term venture capital), and prompted more money and more players to form their own venture partnerships in the late ‘60s through the ‘70s.

But more than creating another investment category, Rock and Davis really helped define a new way of backing entrepreneurs and building companies that persists to this day. It was this unique combination of vision, moxie and money that helped create the tech industry, and why Silicon Valley remains the global center of technology innovation.

Photo: Courtesy Arthur Rock

1965: The Compact Disc (Gadgets)

Way back in 1965, when people were spinning Rubber Soul and A Love Supreme on phonograph players, James T. Russell ushered music and video into the digital era.

Russell, a senior scientist at Pacific Northwest Laboratory at the Battelle Memorial Institute, was not at all happy with the vinyl records of the day. They were fragile, and constantly worn by the record player. Plus, they simply didn’t sound good enough to satisfy his audiophile tastes.

He knew there was a better way, and began investigating his theory that data could be written and read by light. Lasers, actually. The idea was to create a medium that could be read without anything physically touching it. By removing the drag of a stylus and using the binary aspect of light (light and dark) to mimic data punch cards, Russell argued that an optical medium could hold more data than punch cards or magnetic tape.

Still, the technology wasn’t ready for prime time until 1980, when Phillips and Sony collaborated on the Red Book compact disc standard. Three years later, the first compact discs and CD players hit the U.S. market. The CD-ROM and, later, DVD-ROM, would rule the digital landscape for more than 20 years before being usurped by digital downloads and, in a bit of irony, the resurgence of vinyl.

1968: The Mother of All Demos (Computers)

Forget The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. In the 1960s, Leonard Kleinrock, Donald Davies, and Larry Roberts invented network packet-switching, giving rise to the forerunner of the modern internet. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson built the first version of the seminal UNiX computer operating system. And, yes, Douglas Engelbart gave The Mother of All Demos.

Of all the great computing moments of the 1960s, Engelbart's Demo tops our list. Engelbart ran a computer science lab at Stanford Research Institute, and on Dec. 9, 1968, at a convention hall in San Francisco, he and fellow researchers demonstrated what they called their oN-Line System, or NLS. The system foretold much of what we now take for granted with our personal computers, including the mouse and the graphical user interface and even desktop sharing and video conferencing.

Naturally, few who saw the demo understood its importance. As another NLS researcher said during an event that celebrated the demo's 40th anniversary, 90 percent of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot." But NLS would soon give rise to the GUI machines developed at XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, and the Alto would inspire the Apple Macintosh. The Mother of All Demos indeed.

1960s: Muhammad Ali (Sports)

The 1960s was modern America's most tumultuous decade, and it produced its most tumultuous athlete: boxer Muhammad Ali. As the country found its footing through the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, Ali assumed an important role in both. Rarely has a person, athlete or not, been so equally idolized and vilified.

Ali was known as Cassius Clay when he won an Olympic gold medal in 1960, a medal he may or may not have thrown into the Ohio River after being denied service at a "whites only" restaurant in Louisville. Early versions of the story were detailed, but later biographers concluded that the anecdote was a myth and Ali simply lost the medal.

Three years later Ali became the heavyweight champion of the world, taunting Sonny Liston before the fight with his famous declaration that he would "float like butterfly and sting like a bee," then roaring after Liston didn't answer the bell in the seventh round, "I must be the greatest!"

Clay joined the Nation of Islam in 1964 and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. The Nation of Islam was at the time viewed with suspicion in mainstream America, and aligning himself with its beliefs made Ali a controversial figure. Inside the ring, however, Ali continued his dominant performance, knocking out Liston in the first round of a 1964 rematch and going unbeaten through 1967.

Then, a month after knocking out Zora Folley to go 29-0, Ali was drafted into the U.S. Army. He had already described himself as a conscientious objector, notably declaring in 1966, when he said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." His outspoken opposition to the war is said to have encouraged Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to similarly speak out. After refusing to step forward at his Army induction, Ali was arrested, his boxing license suspended, and his heavyweight title stripped. The resulting trial and appeals ran through 1971 and reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in Ali's favor.

Ali had by then fallen out of favor with the Nation of Islam because he wanted to resume his boxing career. (He later embraced Sunni Islam and, later, Sufism.) Ali returned to the ring after a 3.5-year layoff and promptly regained the heavyweight championship, which he defended against some of the best boxers of that era: Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, and George Foreman.

Ali would have been the most Wired sportsman of the 1960s based on athletic achievements alone, but his pioneering social efforts made him stand out even more. His widely publicized fights in cities like Kinshasa and Manila focused global attention on developing nations, and he has remained a tireless advocate for world peace, civil rights, humanitarianism and other causes.

"I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me," Ali once said. "It would be a better world."

In 1993, Ali tied with Babe Ruth in a 1993 poll of the most recognized athlete in America, and Sports Illustrated named him sportsman of the century in 1999. Today, as Ali battles Parkinson's disease, his fast hands and liquid smoothness in the ring is a thing of the past, but he remains as iconic as ever.

Photo: In this Feb. 25, 1964, file photo, Sonny Liston, right, lowers his head and works in close during the sixth round of heavyweight championship fight against Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) in Miami Beach, Florida. Credit: AP

1963: Sketchpad (Design)

That year, however, Doug Engelbart changed the way we interact with machines with the invention of the computer mouse. His wasn't the only computer interface created in 1963, though — Sketchpad, created by Ph.D. student Ivan Sutherland, also launched that year, featuring a stylus as the first example of a screen-based graphical user interface. Its development spurred decades of computer-aided design.

Sketchpad's light pen drew directly on a monitor, and the program locked in right angles, arcs and other shapes to help create detailed, accurate and replicable illustrations. It was the first abstract computer input, a way to both represent code visually, and to translate a visual drawing into code. Decades later, after CAD became prevalent, Sutherland’s program won him the 1988 Turing Award. And now, almost 50 years after Sutherland's invention, touch-screen computer control is finally eroding the mouse’s place in computing.

1968: Saigon Execution Photo (Photography)

The '60s was a huge decade for photography. Kodak’s Instamatic helped create the market for point-and-shoot cameras as we know it. Photos became symbiotic with rock-and-roll, with the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the New York fashion scene generating some of the most iconic images in music and popular culture history.

But the most transformative photo event of the decade has to be the Saigon execution photo, taken Feb. 1, 1968, in which Major General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shoots a captured Viet Cong member in the head in front of photographer Eddie Adams. The photo had an enormous impact on anti-war sentiment in the U.S. and was many Americans' first exposure to the brutality of the Vietnam conflict. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

Not only did it demonstrate the power of a single image to shift public perception, it signified a dramatic increase in intimacy of photography’s relationship with war. Additional iconic images would come from Vietnam, like that of 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc fleeing naked on the street after being burned by U.S. napalm, but Adams’ photo stands as an icon for the Vietnam War specifically, and the primal nature of human conflict in general.

It’s a class of photo that can only happen once, with many equally dramatic and heartbreaking images being taken in almost every war since that never come close to achieving the same level of fame or impact.

Photo: Eddie Adams

Since 2007, Wired.com’s This Day In Tech blog has reflected on important and entertaining events in the history of science and innovation, pursuing them chronologically for each day of the year. Hundreds of these essays have now been collected into a trivia book, Mad Science: Einstein’s Fridge, Dewar’s Flask, Mach’s Speed and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World. It goes on sale Nov. 13, and is available for pre-order today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online book stores.